Perhaps the greatest challenge that Obama and the progressive community faces is the destruction of the media's carefully crafted and jealously guarded myth of 'the Maverick' John McCain. As billmon's fantastic diary pointed out, McCain has always been an unremarkable politician who willfully embraces politically expediency to the delight of a media that loves to praise hollow and often underhanded gestures of bipartisanship. Describing his self-serving posture in the Keating Five Scandal, billmon notes:
The lesson he learned, I think, is that pseudo-candor (truthiness) usually trumps the genuine article (McCain was way ahead of his time on this) And so he hasn’t hesitated to flip and flop shamelessly if (and these are the key points) it is in his interest and he thinks he can get away with it.
Basically, McCain's artificial persona has given him cover to indulge the worst tendencies of career politicians while simultaneously being held to a totally inverted set of standards.
Today, the Washington Post furthered its long, miserable decline into stagnant conservatism with an article that perfectly demonstrates the grotesque influence of the Maverick myth. While WaPo has rabidly gone after Obama for alleged 'reversals,' they consider McCain's actual flip-flops to be evidence of a 'complex mind.' Instead of a politician embracing political expediency to suit his personal ambitions, they perceive an epic tragedy with a brilliant Shakespearean hero grappling with bouts of 'moral anguish.' This is the apotheosis of the 'McCain hates that Obama is forcing him to use negative campaigning' meme, a meme that some have already started to reject, but will, if this WaPo article is any indication, continue to pervade the media establishment through the unprecedented ugliness of the coming months.
The article starts out with the prerequisite myth-crafting that conjures images of cowboys and hardened stoics, a brazen attempt to inoculate the reader from an honest, objective reading of McCain's record.
McCain is a figure from an old-fashioned America that is out of fashion in our most cosmopolitan precincts -- the America of "Gunsmoke" and Gary Cooper, not "The Daily Show" and George Clooney. For McCain, "Duty, Honor, Country" isn't patriotic pablum but a credo to live by. And he has worked out a way to apply the credo to politics. He summarized it in a commencement address at Johns Hopkins in 1999, when he gave the graduates this advice:
"Enter public life determined to tell the truth; to put problem-solving ahead of partisanship; to defend the public interest against the special interests; to risk your personal ambitions for the sake of the country and the ideals that make her great. Keep your promise to America, and you will keep your honor. You will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure."
"That's what it's all about," McCain said in the interview.
But such high-mindedness can be difficult to sustain, and when he fails to do so, McCain's self-criticism can be devastating.
So McCain embodies the great ideal of the Old West, all sun-burned muscle and self-rolled cigarettes, even though he actually fails to realize it. That, however, is okay since McCain is also tortured by his shortcoming. This, as billmon brilliantly observed, is only interpreted as 'proof' of McCain's inner resolve. It doesn't matter if the man matches the myth, the media knows 'the real McCain' is totally unlike the one who has been serving in the U.S. Senate for the past two decades.
Like a delusional paramour desperately trying to convince her friends that the deadbeat boyfriend they all know and see is actually a chivalric gentleman behind closed doors, WaPo eagerly tells us that the evident contradictions that some might consider 'flip-flops' are really part of the complex inner-world that constitutes all true Mavericks. In the eyes of the old media, the washed-up, disheveled drifter passed out on their sofa is a modern day Gary Cooper, and what others 'misinterpret' as craven immaturity is really an expression of the mysterious inner demons of a torture romantic.
Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with a politician shifting his views or responding to the will of his constituents, but these maneuvers need to be recognized for what they are. Obama, for example, is an upstanding guy driven by general ethical precepts, but he's also a politician who is willing to vote and compromise for strategic gain. This, however, cannot be the case for McCain. McCain's shifts, as drastic and frequent as they have been, must instead be romanticized and rationalized as further proof of the notion that he has transcended the realm of ordinary politics. For the old media, McCain is like a hyper-masculine, white-haired Buddha who lives in enlightened resignation amidst the everyday bullshit of the Beltway culture. As such, his surrender to its mundane demands sets the stage of what can only be interpreted as a great moral drama.
That ambition led McCain into a moral lapse that appalled him. It involved an ongoing dispute in South Carolina over the tradition of flying the Confederate battle flag atop the state capitol, in Columbia.
"I had promised to tell the truth no matter what," McCain wrote in the book. "When I broke it, I had not just been dishonest, I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable."
Just as he had done with the Keating Five Scandal eleven years earlier, McCain tossed out his 'principles' when his ambition demanded it, only to crawl back to the media's welcoming arms as John the Penitent, a coward redeemed by the eagerness with which he confessed his sins. The old media, as WaPo here demonstrates, showered him with superlatives for his posture which, though there were no real acts to back it up, was almost universally described as the restoration of the 'real McCain.' Yet, underlying this bizarre psychodrama was a simple case of a media savvy politician satisfying both of the media's schizophrenic urges. From one side of his mouth, he denounced the everyday sins of American politics, but from the other, he deliberately kept them alive. In the process, he mirrored the media's own attachment to the petty politics that simultaneously inspires its earnest obsession and disingenuous disgust.
Yet, in its compulsive need to dig beyond the reality of John McCain, the media insists upon proving that there is some sort pop-psychological dualism at work. McCain is really the Maverick, you see, but he is torn between his Mavericky superego and his 'fighter pilot' id.
McCain's harsh self-criticism suggests the emotionalism that colleagues and friends say is typical of him.
"I think his mind is visceral," Hart said, "driven less by thought and more by feelings. This doesn't mean he's totally reactive or without logic or thought processes; it just means he's a fighter pilot. He reacts to circumstances."
And as the Washington Post would have us believe, this is a common flaw for heroic men of untamed passion. His 'complex mind' forces him to embrace brutish simplifications, and so, for example, his absurdly black & white understanding of the war in Iraq is merely the consequence of a nuanced psyche that only his dear friends (i.e., apparently, Gary Hart and the media) can understand.
In the same way, WaPo tells us that McCain is "a restless seeker of stimulation and information," even though his "specific policy positions can be less clear, and less consistent." This voracious seeker of information, an avid scholar who does not shy away from heated debate, is like Aristotle mixed with a character from Top Gun, a living tome of knowledge that's written in vapid slogans and incoherent policy prescriptions.
But again, this contradiction is just another indication of his 'complex mind.'
Philosophically, McCain has never been easily pigeonholed, perhaps because philosophy doesn't interest him.
He is the philosophy-hating philosopher, the politics-hating politician, the cowardice-hating coward, the self-hating McCain with the magical ability to actually be what he is not by the sheer power of his self-hatred! For this reason, according to the Washington Post, this Senator with an ideologically conservative voting record is actually a progressive.
But he acknowledges, when asked, he is really a Theodore Roosevelt Republican, and TR was hardly a conservative. He favored aggressive government regulation of the economy and a stiff inheritance tax -- both part of the Square Deal he pushed as his domestic agenda. TR also radically expanded the national park system and brought hundreds of millions of acres under federal protection or ownership. He was the country's first progressive president.
It doesn't matter that McCain and Roosevelt couldn't be further apart on the issues. McCain loves Roosevelt, and by fiat, McCain can be what he loves, even if his actions embody everything that he hates. He is all things at all times. At once, he is the real conservative and the real progressive, the brutish id and the noble ego, Senator McCain and Maverick John. Whatever you want, that's what John McCain is.
Today, for example, McCain is both the Rovian candidate and the respectful campaigner.
Although he hammers Obama in public appearances, he also has respectful words for his opponent. In the interview last week, he said, "I'm surprised that I am as close in the polls as I am right now. When you look at the fantastic campaign that Senator Obama has waged, it really is quite remarkable."
Though he has released a series of the most absurdly juvenile ads in recent history, he is absolved by his occasional tendency to mutter respectful words about the other candidate's campaign. Even when he bashed the media for its perceived infidelity, his vicious attacks on their credibility are promptly forgotten when he pulls them close and whispers, "I didn't mean it baby, you know the real McCain." Unlike Obama's unforgivable sins, McCain's lapses are not to be taken seriously, and his contradictions are mere examples of what the Washington Post refers to here as "McCain's romantic fatalism," a noble resignation to failure and self-degradation. According to the old media, the smears and the lies and the reversals are all tragic necessities that weigh heavily on McCain's reluctant shoulders. In truth, according to the Beltway mythmakers, John McCain represents the last, righteous gasp of a dying breed of American heroes.
But really, he's just a hypocritical asshole.